When I was a boy, my favorite artist was Norman Rockwell. His “Satur-day Evening Post” covers used to amuse and move me. I remember one in partic-ular that showed a barber cutting a boy’s hair. He had got so distracted by the magazine the boy was reading that he cut a swathe right up his head, like a ski run clearing up a forested mountain.

Rockwell’s images of small-town America seemed to me charming and I admired the artist’s skill at depicting real people. To me, he got the citizens of this nation right, along with the places where they worked and the things they used. The warm colors that this artist preferred added to his allure for me.

Later, I discovered that I should not have liked Rockwell all that much. He was merely sentimental, critics said, hardly a serious artist. Instead, he was a populist, someone who did the easy stuff rather than the work of a real artist. Yes, he had a certain technique and surface gloss, but he should never be classed among the real painters of our time.

This past autumn, however, I discovered that Norman Rockwell was being celebrated as a serious artist after all. Suddenly, it seemed, the critical judgment of the past was overturned and he was now being recognized as an imposing fig-ure with talent, worthy of being taken seriously.

Museums across America were now taking part in a national tour of his works that would end at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. In a lead article featured in the New York Times, critic Michael Kimmelman even called him “a good artist,” and praised him because “Rockwell gave us a people’s history of America during the first half of the century.”

Something of the same turn-around in critical opinion took place much earlier with one of my favorite artists in another sphere – classical music. Sir Ed-ward Elgar loomed large for me way back in my teenage years. He had won my affection especially with his “Dream of Gerontius,” a grand-scale oratorio that used to thrill me from adolescence on.

Elgar, however, I later discovered, did not rate with critics. In the middle decades of the century now past, the Boston Symphony and other leading musical ensembles would not perform his major works. Everyone who ever attended a high school graduation, of course, knew his “Pomp and Circumstance” march but music lovers were unlikely to hear his symphonies, concertos, or songs.

Some three decades ago, however, critics discovered that Elgar was not so bad after all. Since that recognition, he has come to enjoy great popularity. No-wadays his compositions are performed regularly to great acclaim by orchestras, soloists, and singers. Not only is it allowed to like Elgar now, but you can claim him as a favorite composer as I still do.

I cite Rockwell and Elgar simply to indicate how much, as we age, re-ceived opinion changes. If you live long enough, you come to see, not only huge changes in inventions, such as the arrival of computers, but also more subtle transformations of thought and opinion. Nothing stands still, not even the way we approach works of art.

Relativity marks our lives much more than we ever imagined it would. As the ancient Greek philosopher saw it, the stream moves on and you can never dip your toe into the same water twice. Critical opinion is always fickle. The spirit of the time, what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, determines outlook much more widely than we would have thought possible.

Some people among us manage to hold on to cherished tastes their whole lives. Others of us tack our sails to winds prevailing at the moment. Most people, I suspect, do both. We hang on to some of our tastes while exchanging other favo-rites, swapping the old for the new.

This ebb and flow helps to make the world more interesting. It gives us material to reflect on and to talk about with friends. New enthusiasms feed our souls as do changed appraisals of figures we have known for a long time.

We can also take pleasure when others swing around to recognize our good taste and uphold what we judge excellent. I feel glad about critics having arrived at the point of sharing my own sound judgements. Whatever took them so long?

My prejudices in the area of culture have also held up and withstood much pressure to change. Sinatra, for example, I have never much liked. Nor do I have any feeling for Barbra Streisand. In so-called higher culture, I still do not like De-bussy, no matter his greatness in musical history.

Given time, however, these dislikes may break down. Meantime, I cherish both likes and dislikes and wait for changes inevitably to arrive.

Richard Griffin

What a pleasure it was, in the week straddling February and March, to re-visit two favorite pieces of music! Both recall the second decade of the twentieth century.

Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” which builds on a poetic text by James Agee, never fails to move me with its bittersweet memory of child-hood. As sung by soprano Jayne West and played by the Boston Philharmonic under Benjamin Zander’s direction, this work stirred up the vision of a different America, yet one where the familiar deepest questions about life arise.

An autobiographical fragment from Agee, the text, as set to music by Barber, conveys the feeling of a summer evening and the varied noises of a neighborhood. People sit on their porches rocking back and forth; both people and things go by. This peaceful atmosphere is interrupted by a streetcar “raising its iron moan.”

The child, his parents, uncle, and aunt lie on quilts spread in the back yard. They talk quietly while under the stars that seem very near. Among the voices the child hears are those of his mother “who is good to me” and his father of whom the child uses the same words.

And, yet, “who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,” the narra-tor asks himself. Thinking of his parents, he asks God to “remember them kindly in their time of trouble and in their hour of taking away.”

Finally, he is put to bed and “soft, smiling sleep” approaches. But he wonders about those who love and care for him “but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”

The life-long quest for self-identity is a theme many of us older people re-flect upon. We think back to our childhood and evoke scenes like that drawn by James Agee. The sounds of our early years form part of this recollection, those noises characteristic of the places where we grew up.

Though Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” recalls the same historical era, it differs sharply from “Knoxville.” Britten chooses texts from the Latin Requiem Mass and from the anti-war poet Wilfred Owen. He weaves the two in and out, using the poet’s words as a commentary (often ironic) on the liturgical text.

The oratorio was written to mark the consecration in 1962 of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry, England. The original building had been largely demolished by German bombers in1940.

As performed by the Boston Symphony with outstanding soloists Chris-tine Goerke, Ian Bostridge, and Thomas Quasthoff, and both adult and children’s choruses, the work received a fervently appreciative response from audience members. Its skillful mix of so many musical and linguistic forces stirred us listeners to admiration.

For critic Michael Steinberg, the collision between innocence and corruption runs through all of Britten’s work including the “War Requiem.” In the Of-fertory of the requiem, for instance, after the chorus sings of God’s promise to “Abraham and his seed,” the words of Wilfred Owen come as a shock. In Owen’s text, as in the Bible, Abraham is told to sacrifice a ram in place of his son Isaac: “But the old man would not do so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

In the liturgical poem Dies Irae, the sinner asks Jesus for mercy and ap-peals to his forgiveness of Mary Magdalen and the Good Thief. In response Wil-fred Owens pessimistically prays for deliverance from the arrogance that causes war: “Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm / Great gun towering toward Hea-ven, about to curse; / Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm, / And beat it down before its sins grow worse; / But when thy spell be cast complete and whole, / May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!”

The bitter catastrophe that was the first world war polluted the first part of the century just finished. The memory of how it destroyed a civilization and prepared for the horrors of the second world war only thirty years later must have impressed itself deeply on the parents and grandparents of today’s old people.

If, as a Swedish scholar has observed, it is a mark of later life to experience an “increasing sense of connection to earlier generations,” artistic works like the two cited here enhance that connection. They remind us both of a different world that existed before America’s entrance into the Great War and of the loss of innocence brought on by that war.

The musical artists, Britten and Barber, and the poetic artists, Owen and Agee, enable us to enter into both experiences. The one set of events, taking place on a world stage, was epic in its effects. The other, a domestic scene that focuses on the microcosm of one man’s life, raises deep questions about who each one of us is.

Richard Griffin

A poem, parts of which are quoted here, spoke movingly to a group of older people recently gathered together to think about spirituality. Written by Sis-ter Margaret Ringe, this poem seemed to touch the hearts of those who listened to it. Perhaps it will have something of the same effect on you as you apply its verses to yourself or to an older person important to you.

“I’m old now and much is new / I can’t do what I used to do.

I can’t do what I used to do / I’m doing what, for me, is new.”

The poet has discovered that later life brings her many new experiences. Though part of this newness is inability to perform certain physical tasks, she makes a more important discovery. She has learned more about her own emotional life, drawing nearer to her own heart.

This woman has also discovered new kinds of thinking, a luxury that her previous lifestyle did not allow enough of. As a religious person, she has also found a new contemplative life. Her prayer now has more of a mystical quality to it than before: instead of doing all the talking, she allows space for God to speak.

She spends time assembling the wide variety of emotional, mental, and in-stinctual inner events that now pass through her mind and heart. With her the prophecy of the Hebrew Bible has come true: she dreams dreams. Perhaps she dreamed earlier in her life, but now she takes note of this mysterious activity.

The poet goes on the lookout for people to listen to her story. Everyone has that need but she acknowledges it openly, her desire to find those able to pro-vide sympathetic listening. Similarly, she searches for some sort of repository where her new-found wisdom can be placed. Yes, she has some wisdom, though one can imagine her wary of counting on it.

Growing in confidence, the poet dares recognize that now she can actually do a whole lot of things. This recognition takes her by surprise perhaps because of her awareness of what she cannot any longer do.

She takes on some difficult tasks: listening, learning, and, especially, changing long embedded opinions. Perhaps it’s because she makes a point of talk-ing to other people, maybe new friends. Who would have thought it possible to make such radical changes so late in life?

New capacities for giving continue to surprise her. That she can comfort others instead of focusing on her own problems counts as one such surprise. Another is the strength – spiritual, moral, emotional perhaps – that she finds to share with other people. Even what she calls loveliness flows out of her, much to her astonishment.

She may have underestimated her juniors. Some young people now seem to look upon her with high regard. Yes, many Americans may still discount the aged, but at least these know better.

Unknown to themselves, these young people may even be looking for models of later life. They may want to study their own future selves in order to draw hope for the distant future.

In concluding this part of the poem, the author repeats the refrain but this time with the subtle change “I’m doing what, for me, is new.” For her, the possi-bilities of later life have been revealed and she feels much the better for being older.

The beauty of the poem, for me, is its revelation of how mind and heart can flourish in advanced maturity. At least, it serves as a corrective to the pessim-ism that can oppress us all when we think about the approach of old age. But the sentiments expressed here do not amount to mere optimism. Rather, they are grounded in a hopefulness about life.

Time after time life surprises us. We think we have it all plotted out, our futures easy to chart. But being human can never be entirely predictable. Vitality, spirit, and heart have a way of breaking in upon our complacency. The last stages of our lives can, after all, turn out to be the ones richest in reality.

Richard Griffin

With friends like these two, how can I miss as a writer? The one, an age peer from Winchester, attaches a note to the material he sends me, adding “if you can’t get a column out of this, better hang up your shingle.”

He has sent me an article by Zoe Ingalls in the Chronicle of Higher Education that is all about an artist, Jacqueline Hayden, who exhibits life-size nude photographs of elderly men and women. These photos have reportedly drawn sharply contrasting reactions from viewers.

At the Yale University Art Gallery a 70-year-old woman docent told the artist she found them “repulsive.” But at an exhibit in Northampton, an older woman thanked her because it was the first time “I’ve ever seen anybody on the wall who looked like me.”

Does my friend expect me to construct a peaceful path between zealots who feel turned on by the naked elder body as a sublime new concept of beauty and critics who find the whole idea repugnant? Where’s that shingle?

The other friend of many years’ standing, a Canadian, emails me from Montreal, heading his message “grist for your mill.” Then he states “I presume that Saul’s sex life is good material for your column.”

He informs me about a newspaper story on the Nobel Prize winning writer, Saul Bellow, becoming a father again, this time at age 84. Bellow, it turns out, was born in the province of Quebec and grew up there before his family moved to Chicago when he was nine. And, to make matters even more Canadian, the new mother, Janis Freedman, Saul’s fifth wife, was born in Toronto.

“Perhaps their ‘Canadian roots’ have something to do with their fertili-ty,” my friend suggests.

So should I contact Saul Bellow and ask him if indeed that is true? “Do you, Mr. Bellow, feel more virile by reason of spending the first nine years of your life in America’s attic, as the great Canadian novelist Robinson Davies used to call his country?

Or, perhaps, I should ask him if he takes Viagra. Recently a couple of friends over sixty were telling me about being on this pill. One of them, age 62, reported that his doctor, a woman, had taken the initiative and given him a pre-scription, remarking that she thought it would be good for him.

When I asked these latter two gentleman about the effects of Viagra, they both agreed that it had served them well. Their phrasing intrigued me, their saying that “it helped make the work easier.” I had not quite thought of the activity that way but perhaps thinking about it as a form of work rather than retirement could be provocative.

This being America, I feel sure that I could have provided an interview with many more details from one of those fellows but, again, because of readers’ sensibilities I have refrained.

In place of the interview, perhaps I can simply allude to some new body-oriented definitions that have been making the rounds on the Internet. They de-rive from a weekly contest appearing in the Washington Post.

“Abdicate” is a verb meaning “to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.” Similarly, the adjective “flabbergasted” means “appalled over how much weight you have gained.” And “lymph” is another verb signifying “to walk with a lisp.”

Far be it from me, however, to make fun of my age peers whether round, heavy, or, for that matter, lisping. You will never find me badmouthing anyone who can boast about having lived long. Rather, I leave joke-making about elders  to the boldest of professional comedians.

Among them, Jonathan Winters, himself an elder, stands out for his ability to deliver an occasional anecdote that pokes fun at people of a certain age.

Recently, on the “News Hour,” he told host Jim Lehrer, the following story flowing from a group trip that he and his wife took to Greece.

They were coming out of a temple some 50 miles from Athens. He noticed a woman turning toward him. “I know who you are,” she said.
“Yes, so do I; it’s on my dog tag,” he replied.
“You are him, aren’t you?,” she continued undeterred.
“I’m him,” the comedian admitted. “But the important thing is who you are, dear,” he added.
“I’m Agnes Lenler; we’re from Terre Haute, Indiana. This is my husband, Howard, my second husband. My first husband was run over.”
(“Better be on your toes,” Winters silently admonished the successor.)
“Let me ask you something, Mr. Winters,” the woman went on.
“Yes.”
“What did you think of the temple?”
“I was terribly disappointed,” said Winters.
“Why?”
“Everything was broken.”
“My God, man,” she exclaimed, “it was five thousand years before Christ.”
“It should be repaired by now,” Winters suggested.
The lady shook her head.
Then the somewhat crabbed husband said to her: “You know, honey, a lot of men are completely burned out.”

Richard Griffin

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of my return to the world. In Feb-ruary 1975, I signed papers by which the pope released me from the priesthood and, at the same time, the Jesuit order allowed me to depart from its ranks. During that month I began living on my own the way I had never done before.

This double departure brought to an end an ecclesiastical career that had also lasted twenty-five years. My Jesuit years featured many experiences still precious to me: the euphoria of discovering a deeper spiritual life in the novitiate; teaching in Jesuit schools and in adult education settings; living in European countries; and, most of all, ordination to the priesthood and the ministry that flowed from it.

On occasion, people still ask me why I left. When they do, I usually give them the short answer – “I changed.” A more satisfying answer takes several hours of conversation or hundreds of pages of memoir. Just tracing the changes in me takes a long time; when you add the startling changes that took place in church and society during my quarter of a century among the Jesuits, the answer becomes much more complicated.

The leaving itself took place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and affection be-tween Jesuit officials and me. I then felt greater respect for the Jesuit society than I ever had before.

My ties to former colleagues remain strong and I count many members of the clergy as good friends. I feel fortunate that the church had changed enough that my de-parture could happen without the animosity and secretiveness of previous practice.

Despite the satisfactions and joys of my first career, I have never regretted leav-ing. Returning to the world has brought me great blessings. Among them, marriage and fatherhood rank highest, but the opportunity to experience life from new angles has con-tinued to feed my soul. Ordinary experiences that have palled by now for some of my college classmates have remained fresh for me, starting late in life as I did. Just being a householder, for instance, is something that I still enjoy.

To have been given world enough and time for multiple careers and a variety of experiences as a lay person gratifies me greatly. That’s why I’m celebrating in my heart this month’s anniversary.

There does remain one catch, however. Despite serious efforts, I have not been able to escape ministry entirely. The Hound of Heaven, it seems, has not yet done chasing me. Last winter in Florida, I returned to the pulpit after a twenty-four year lapse, to preach about the spirituality of aging, an exercise that I am repeating several times this winter.

Still, I welcome the identity of layperson. This vantage point of not being an offi-cial spokesman has given me a freedom to “experiment with truth,” as Gandhi put it, and to take my place as an ordinary member of society. The mystery that characterized my early career has not disappeared, fortunately. But the mystique has, and I feel freer to ex-plore the world anew.

Aging gives a perspective that increasingly seems precious to me. The accumula-tion of years enables me now to see patterns in my life that previously remained obscure. I can discern a providence at work that has guided me toward fulfillments that I had never expected to experience.

Tentatively at least, I have been enabled to answer for myself various questions. One such question that used to trouble me goes this way:  “Was my entering the Jesuit ranks a mistake, one that I should have escaped from much sooner?

This issue now seems to me artificial, one that does not require an answer. That was simply what I did with my life;  this course of action helped make me who I am. My entering was a good, though mixed, thing; so was my leaving.

For me, it is important to cultivate both continuity and discontinuity in life. That’s why, when celebrating my return to the world, I cherish many experiences from the time when I was living outside the world.

But I also place high value on my breaking with the disciplines of my first career. Doing things that I had never done before, starting in middle age, was welcome to me and I am glad that my life course broke into two parts.

Two peak experiences, one from each half, stand out in memory for their iconic character. The first was my ordination to the priesthood in June of 1962. When Cardinal Cushing laid hands on me, I felt ecstatic with a joy that stayed with me for weeks.

Similarly, when I stood nearby at the birth of my daughter in January 1980, I felt a joy that swept over me along with a mix of other emotions so intense as to bring tears to my eyes.

Both events remain vitally important to me. They help define a life lived in two different spheres of being.

Richard Griffin

Last winter, on a visit to Orlando, I traveled by van to a professional meeting at Disneyworld. On the way I admired the brilliant night sky that featured a full, white moon surrounded by bright stars. All of a sudden, however, I was struck by doubt forcing me to turn toward a colleague with a pressing question – “Is it real?”

This question frequently arises for me in Florida. I feel wary about the tricks of the Disney people and their collaborators. They know how to put moons and stars up into the sky and make them look like the real thing.

On my latest foray into Florida last week, I experienced the same blurring between reality and illusion. This time the site was a town called Lady Lake, some sixty miles northwest of Orlando. The place features a giant retirement community now numbering about nineteen thousand people, considerably larger than the surrounding towns. It is called “The Villages” and encompasses half a dozen or so enclaves in the form of gated communities.

The Villages’ Town Square consists of stores, restaurants, theaters, and other establishments, all made to look much older than they actually are. These buildings wear signs identifying the dates when they were supposedly built. The dates, however, turn out not to be real but rather to be invented so as to make everything seem of another era.

The most prominent building is a church, not built by any religious group, but rather by the developers of the Villages. It looms up tall and serves as the focal point of the surrounding area. In passing, the visitor notices “ruins” – low walls that purport to date from the time of the Spanish settlements. These, too, it turns out, cannot be taken seriously except as artifacts playing their part in the ensemble.

Village residents also make use of paper bills that look like the real thing except that they carry pictures of Mr. Schwartz, the patriarch who founded the Villages, on the twenty and his son on the ten. Everybody calls this “funny money” but it can be used as cash for purchases.

The powerful Schwartz family that developed  the Villages plans to extend them across what are now neighboring fields. They will build many more houses and villas for the crowd of future retired people expected to pour into central Florida.

As must show in these words, I have trouble with the concept behind all of this illusion. Out of sympathy with the developers, I like to take my reality straight, without the sleight of hand that so much of Florida features. Please allow me to live with things as they are, rather than in a reality that has been engineered out of shape.

What I did find real, however, are the people who live in this retirement haven – at least those who come to St. Timothy’s Church where I had the pleasure to giving talks on aging and spirituality. The men and women who take part in the life of that church turned out to be vital and stimulating. My discussions with them renewed my hope for the future of our country, where aging will help shape the coming decades.

St. Timothy’s parish has enrolled an astonishing six hundred people as volunteers in some fifty ministries. They visit the sick, feed the hungry, bring holy communion to shut-ins, and work on social issues. As the woman who serves as a professional coordinator of the volunteers told me, “People here are very giving, they’ll do anything for anyone.”

Sitting down for an hour and a half with a group of six of these people, I discovered a lively sense of their group resources. As Milton, a retired marketing manager, says: “The one thing I love is there is someone here who has been there and done that, anything  you want to talk about from jet engines to the stock market to putting in telephone wires. The amount of knowledge is staggering.”

So, I would add, is a spiritual resource – the will to serve. These volunteers identify strongly with their role as church ministers. They think of themselves as on the edge of a new church, one in which the ordained priest feels happy to acknowledge the lay priesthood of members. These people are unanimous in crediting their pastor for recognizing their role, as not simply supplementary, but as at the heart of what it means to be a church member.

And the volunteers feel rewarded in this ministry. “There is always someone to pat you on the back and say you did a good job,” enthuses one woman among them. Another says, “How much more I gain from this experience than I ever give!”

So in a land where illusion plays a large role, it is gratifying to find so many people for whom the reality of service to their fellow human beings looms so large.

Richard Griffin

My long-time dear friend, (let’s call him Paul), has endured several weeks of life-threatening crises. Major surgery three times, continuing infection, return trips to the intensive care unit, and other horrors have entangled him in a seemingly unending round of severe health troubles. Along with his many other friends, I have felt much grief and foreboding at what Paul has had to suffer.

This suffering began weeks before he entered the hospital. While undergoing a series of tests to determine the cause of weight loss, lack of appetite, and undefined pain, he continued to decline alarmingly.

What shocked us friends was the discovery that Paul’s primary care physician had not actually seen him for at least a month. Instead, during this period Paul was seen by his doctor’s physician’s assistant and by the physicians who supervised his tests, but never his main doctor.

It still seems almost incredible that a doctor with overall responsibility would neglect to take an action probably taught on the first day he began medical school, namely: Look At Your Patient and See How He Appears!

Admittedly, Paul’s illness would have been difficult to diagnose under any conditions. But friends who saw him recognized immediately how badly he was hurting. That he was allowed to decline so alarmingly for weeks without intervention still shocks those of us familiar with this history.

In reflecting on the experience, Paul draws this conclusion: “The medical system is geared to do things in a certain way,  – for example giving tests. If you seem to be getting sicker, you have to do something yourself, even if the medical staff says you’re all right.”

From my friend’s experience and his analysis of it, I have taken at least  two lessons to heart.

First, if we can, we must all advocate for our own health care. We cannot risk waiting on initiatives from professionals. To a certain degree, we must push our health care providers to take care of us. Otherwise we run the risk of neglect that can lead to serious harm.

This holds especially true for us elders. Unless we are rich and famous, we can easily find ourselves deprived of top-flight care or, for that matter, adequate care. In all too many situations, if we do not advocate for ourselves, health care professionals will not give us the attention that we need.

There is at least one large problem with this advice, however. Many people cannot find in themselves this kind of zeal for demanding their rights. Especially when they do not feel well, they may be unable to summon up the necessary bravado. That was my friend Paul’s situation.

My second lesson, therefore, follows. If we can do so, we should find someone to act as our advocate.  It can make a decisive difference for seriously ill people to have a relative or friend  to help push for  needed medical attention.

In Paul’s crisis, several of his long-time friends got together and came to the consensus that he should be hospitalized immediately. We then asked one of our number, a physician himself, to take the initiative and press for Paul to be admitted.

That, in fact, happened and none too soon. It was quickly determined that Paul needed immediate surgery. Further delay might have led to his death.

After his admission to the hospital, though he then got excellent care, Paul continued to need someone to advocate for his needs. Fortunately, at that point he received constant support from one of his brothers who traveled from another state and remained with Paul every day for weeks. Not only did this brother help to sustain Paul’s morale during this ordeal, but he also proved an important advocate with the medical staff.

This saga of my friend Paul dramatizes the need for family members and friends to take initiative on behalf of others. Many do, in fact, but more of us either fail to recognize the need to take action or let obstacles deter us.

It can be touchy to come forward when we judge a friend or family member is ail-ing. We may run the risk of indignant rejection. Persistence may be required if we are seriously committed to helping.  And much tact may be a needed to prove ourselves advocates worthy of the sick person’s trust.

I still think, however, that friends and family can be indispensable when one is hurting. I take satisfaction from knowing that my friend Paul found such people in time of crisis who may have saved his life. Everyone ought to have family and friends like this.

To become good healers, physicians depend upon our sharing with them our feelings about ourselves and our own appraisal of what’s wrong. In many instances they also need to hear from family members and friends who know the patient well.

Far from resenting such advocacy as interference, wise physicians will know how to respond to the benefit of the person who is sick and needs healing.

Richard Griffin